Back | Next
Contents

chapter nineteen

Providence Station

Transverse, non-congruent


Isaac studied Alex Creed through the abstract window into the storage-room-turned-cell. The man sat at an awkward angle, one arm and one leg ending in stumps, his powerful synthoid body paralyzed from the neck down. He was completely at their mercy.

Why then does he look so at ease? Isaac wondered. So confident?

“How’s the shoulder?” he asked, not looking away from the prisoner.

“Good as new.” Susan gave her shoulder a quick pat. “He didn’t so much as dent my skeleton. Ziegler even patched up my cosmetic layer without me asking.”

“And the agents he shot?”

“They’ll be fine once their bodies are fixed up. Neither of them suffered connectome damage.”

“What about your team, Cephalie?” Isaac asked.

“Five ACs injured, including me, plus one fatality.” The LENS floated up beside him, and Cephalie jumped to his shoulder.

“Permanent?”

“Thankfully not. She’ll lose a few months once she’s pulled from the mindbank, but that’s about it.”

“And you? How bad was it?”

“I got a little singed during the fight, but he never broke through to my core code.” She twirled her cane, then planted it against his shoulder, which he felt as minor pressure through his virtual senses. “Nothing I can’t restore from backups.”

“Hate to put it this way,” Susan said, “but we got lucky.”

“I know,” Cephalie agreed. “I’ve never lost control of a LENS like that before. If this is a taste of what the Institute can do, they’re not messing around.”

“Are we sure he doesn’t have any more surprises?” Isaac asked.

“As sure as we can be,” Cephalie said. “I’ve exchanged the microbots in his maintenance loop and have full control over all his systems. His body is typical for Argo Division—nothing unusual to report there—and the room’s data isolated. Six ACs from Gordian have the infostructure locked down, just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” Isaac glanced her way.

“Just in case he really does have something up his sleeve.”

“I could go in there and disarm him,” Susan suggested. “I mean in a literal sense.”

“Susan,” Isaac replied dryly, “are you really asking me to give you permission to rip the limbs off a defenseless prisoner?”

“Um . . . well . . . ” Susan seemed to shrink back a little.

“It’s all right.” Isaac gave her a reassuring smile. “I was actually thinking along those same lines, but let’s leave him as is for now and see where this goes.”

He palmed the door open and they stepped in.

“Detective Cho.” Creed smirked up at them. “I figured you’d come to speak with me. And Agent Cantrell. Such a pleasure to see you again. I’m sure you’re both eager to start questioning me, so let me get straight to it. I want to make a deal.”

“What sort of deal?” Isaac replied as the LENS floated around and behind the prisoner.

“My freedom for information.”

“That’s going to be a tall order, given what you just pulled.”

“Then I’m happy to report I have extremely valuable information.” Creed’s smirk vanished. “I want to speak with Commissioner Schröder.”

“You can talk to us first. After that, we may decide to bring your request to the Commissioner.”

“That’s not good enough. I know what the penalty is for my crimes, and it’ll take more than a Themis stiff and an Admin grunt to stay my execution. You want what I know? You bring the Commissioner to me. Those are my terms.”

“We’re all you’re going to get. If you think for one second I’m about to ask Commissioner Schröder to come down here for a chat with the man who almost killed Director Shigeki, then you’ve been thumped around harder than I realized.”

The room fell silent, and Isaac waited for the prisoner’s reaction.

“Look, I see we’ve reached something of an impasse here.” Creed tilted his head and smirked again. “So, how about this? How about I give you two a sample of what I know? Something to whet your appetites.”

“What sort of sample?”

“A peek into recent events. Deep enough to demonstrate my worth, but shallow enough for me to hold a few bargaining chips in reserve.”

“It’ll be a start,” Isaac said guardedly. “What are you willing to share?”

“How about we begin with Reality Flux? I’m not entirely sure how much you’ve uncovered, but that works in your favor. You can check what I’m about to say against your own findings.”

“Believe me when I say we will.”

“Naturally. Then let’s start with what should be obvious by now. Vidali and I were the ones who grabbed the SourceCode ship.”

“How?”

“We phased our scaffold into position nearby and then deployed a shroud to conceal the theft. We also dropped off a small, shrouded drone designed to mimic the ship’s normal log activity. Another drone was used to board the craft and introduce our software into its control systems.”

“Why didn’t Gordian detect your phase-in?”

“We secretly modified our impeller with stealth baffles. We also kept our transdimensional speed low while operating close to SysGov, only ramping up our speed once we’d pulled about a thousand chens away from T1’s outer wall.”

“Why steal the ship?”

“For its industrial equipment. We used those resources to set up a base of operations for our organization.”

“What organization?”

“The Phoenix Institute, of course. Surely that much is obvious by now?”

“Where is this base?”

“Now, Detective, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Creed flashed a crooked smile. “I can’t give you everything for free. But rest assured I do know where it is. Quite the valuable piece of information, wouldn’t you say?”

Isaac remained silent, and Creed continued eventually.

“Anyway, Vidali and I flew the scaffold over to a . . . preselected universe, traveled forty years into the past, and then went to work utilizing the Flux’s resources. Our efforts created a branch in the timeline, as we intended, and spawned a child universe. That new universe then proceeded to peel off from its parent, growing and catching up with the True Present, and granting us a ‘free’ forty years in the process.”

“You and Vidali did this alone?”

“No, there were others. Our colleagues arrived ahead of time by their own means.”

“On Institute TTVs?”

“Of course.”

“How many?”

Creed shook his head slowly. “Try again, Detective.”

“Why only forty years? Why not a hundred? Or a thousand? Why pick that number?”

“Because of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The longer we used the Reality Flux, the greater our chances of being detected. We needed to return that ship to SysGov as soon as possible while also fulfilling our other goals. A branch formed near the True Present would catch up much sooner than one created in—oh, just to throw out an example—the height of the Byzantine Empire.

“Our understanding of how branches in the timeline form is still incomplete—and I don’t claim to be an expert—but the closer the split is to the True Present, the faster the new universe will fully form. That much, at least, seems clear. Besides, we weren’t trying to create a fresh cataclysm like the Gordian Knot or the Dynasty’s temporal replication, so we kept our meddling as conservative as possible to meet our ends. Forty years was enough.”

“What’s the base for?”

“It’s a construction site, mostly.”

“For what?”

“A . . . solution.” His eyes flicked over to Susan. “To a rather large, rather ugly problem.”

“Are you referring to the Admin?”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Is the Institute behind the recent string of terrorist attacks against the Admin?”

“Sorry, Detective. That one will cost you.”

“Why did you destroy the SourceCode ship?”

“We didn’t.”

Isaac paused and considered Creed’s unexpected answer. “If not you or Vidali, then who?”

“I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions.”

“Which are?”

Creed sighed and attempted a shrug, but the gesture came out awkwardly with his immobile shoulders.

“We considered destroying the Flux at one point. We even formulated a plan to instigate a reactor failure, very similar to what actually took it out, but we abandoned the idea in favor of dropping it back off intact. We figured that approach would draw the least attention, even if it ran the risk of leaving behind more evidence. We had also considered keeping the Flux indefinitely but dismissed that option for the same reasons. Too likely to draw unwanted attention.

“So, after forty years of use, we refurbished and scrubbed the ship as best we could before sending it back to SysGov. Vidali and I handled that part, of course. Which should have been the end of it, but as we both know, it blew up shortly after we brought it back.”

“Then why did it explode?”

“First, you need to realize something, Detective. Forty years is a long time, even from the perspective of abstract beings. Opinions can change. Passions can cool. Discord can form where there was once harmony.”

“Some members of the Institute began to doubt your mission?”

One member, to be precise.”

The reference to another member of the Institute caught Isaac’s attention, and he tabbed his screen over to the Kleio’s summary report, then found the reference he was looking for. It was a long shot, but the Kleio’s crew thought the name was tied to Reality Flux somehow.

“Would that person happen to be Ijiraq?”

“Oh?” Creed’s face lit up with bemusement. “Yes, Detective. Quite right. She did go by that alias. I’d love to hear how you came by the name.”

“What was Ijiraq’s role in the Institute?”

“Sorry, but that’s out of bounds until I have some guarantees.”

“What about the attempt on Director Shigeki’s life?”

“Vidali handled that; I wasn’t involved. He hacked into Charm Quark while we were transporting it over to Providence. That gave him access to its drones and printers. The rest should be obvious.”

“Who was the target?”

“Shigeki or one of his under-directors.”

“Why target them?”

“Oh, come now, Detective. Surely, you can put the pieces together without me spelling it out for you.” Creed’s eyes ventured over to Susan once more. “Surely, a man in your position can see this peace won’t last.”

“What are you referring to?”

“The lack of open hostilities between SysGov and the Admin.” He returned his gaze to Isaac. “It won’t last.”

“Why not?”

“The rot in their society stretches too wide, runs too deep. The Admin can be likened to a malignant mass. It grows and mutates over time, strangling everything it touches, be they people or ideas. One look at how they treat ACs over there is enough to know our societies can’t live in harmony. Not for long. This ‘peace’ is a dream, full of naive hopes. The Admin’s a cancer, pure and simple, built out of infectious ideas, not broken cells, and even more dangerous because it is. It’s a blight of dangerous philosophies that will come for us in due time. Do you really think we can stave off the rot indefinitely?”

A cancer? Isaac thought, sitting back. Why does that sound familiar?

He consulted his notes once more and ran a quick search, which brought up the transcript from their interview with Clara Muntero.

And there it is, Isaac thought.

He faced Creed with intense, focused eyes. “What is your connection to an AC professor by the name of Xenophon?”

“I—” Creed frowned, his arrogance dissolving. “What’s it to you?”

“Answer the question. And you can quit playing your games. Tell me how you’re tied to Xenophon, or there’s no deal of any kind.”

“Now listen here—”

“No. You listen. You either give me what I want, or we walk out that door. I don’t care how well you think you scrubbed the scaffold. We in Themis Division have our ways, and we will squeeze the truth out of its systems. You can either cooperate now, or we can do this ourselves.”

Creed lowered his gaze, his confidence shattered, his eyes darting back and forth.

“Well?” Isaac said. “What’s it going to be?”

A moment passed, and Creed began to settle down. He looked up once more, his gaze now cold and distant.

“It would have been better if you’d played along,” he uttered, his voice low and lifeless.

“Data isolation breached!” Cephalie shouted.

Susan stiffened in her seat.

Isaac began to open his mouth, forming the first syllable of a command, when Creed launched himself forward. He shouldn’t have been able to move, but he did, his remaining foot kicking off the floor, and he lunged across the table, fingers reaching for Isaac. He was fast. Terribly fast—

—but Susan was faster.

She rose, the abrupt motion flinging her chair back against the wall. Creed sailed over the table, snarling and grasping, but Susan caught him by the throat. His eyes widened in the split second before she carried him, using her own powerful momentum to override his, driving him back until his head cracked against the back wall.

He flailed at her with his good arm, but Susan pinned it in place with her boot, grabbed hold of the wrist, and yanked it off at the elbow with a sharp jerk. She then stomped on his good knee, shattering it.

He crumpled to the floor, now fully disarmed.

Creed chuckled, his voice distorted by the damage to his throat.

“Well, look at you! Bet you’ve been dying to tear into me this whole time. Did that feel good?”

Susan loomed over him, stoic and silent. She drew her pistol and aimed it at his head.

“Predictable.” Creed coughed out one final laugh. “But you needn’t bother. Enjoy this moment, girl. It won’t last.”

His face twitched, slackened, and the light of life departed his eyes.

* * *

“That can’t be right.”

“What can’t be?” Isaac asked as he and Susan stepped back into Creed’s cell an hour later.

Gilbert turned from his array of overlapping virtual screens. Isaac had called the specialist back from Scaffold Delta after Creed’s unexpected—and improbable—attack, figuring the corpse held more secrets beyond its ability to circumvent standard SysPol restraints. Gilbert had left Kikazaru on the scaffold and returned with two drones, which now hovered above either end of the partially dismantled synthoid.

“It’s his connectome.” Gilbert tapped a finger through one of his screens. “And Vidali’s, too. Between the Creed fragments I’ve pulled from the head and the Vidali fragments Encephalon preserved after her fight, I’m starting to get a better picture of what happened. Both show signs of a trojan layer.”

“Then you don’t think these were the real Vidali and Creed?” Isaac asked.

“No. Seems to me the Institute replaced them at some unknown point.”

“A trojan layer?” Susan asked.

“Deceptive modifications to a connectome’s interface shell,” Isaac explained. “If done right, it would allow them to masquerade as the two Gordian agents. At least on a virtual level.”

“Trojan measures would be more relevant for an AC like Vidali,” Gilbert added, “but it could come up for the fake-Creed as well. During a connectome transfer, for example.”

“Then the real Vidali and Creed are . . . ” Susan said.

“Dead, most likely,” Isaac finished for her. “Replaced by these two Institute operatives. We’ll list the agents as missing for now, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, given what we’ve seen from the Institute so far.” He looked over to Gilbert. “But why do the trojan layers surprise you? I was half-expecting you’d find something along those lines.”

“Me too. And you’re right; that part isn’t too shocking. It’s the other fragments I find odd. Granted, I’m working with less than twenty percent of each connectome, but what I do have looks too similar.”

“How similar?”

“Enough to be the same person.”

“Oh?” Isaac eyes widened. “Then our two Institute operatives . . . ”

“May in fact be copies of someone else,” Gilbert said.

Isaac took a moment to consider this new evidence. Connectome copying was heavily restricted within SysGov, only permissible under a finite and heavily regulated set of circumstances. But the Institute clearly didn’t care about the legal niceties of what they were doing.

And if they feel no compunction when it comes to copying their own minds, Isaac thought, then the seed of a relatively small conspiracy could have sprouted into a vast, ugly weed. A forty-year-old one at that.

“We’ll have to keep that in mind moving forward,” Isaac said. “Good catch.”

Gilbert nodded in appreciation.

“What about the body itself?” Susan gestured over the synthoid on the table. “How was he still able to move? The microbots Cephalie pumped into his system should have kept him paralyzed.”

And he somehow breached data isolation,” Isaac said. “The question is how.”

“I can help there.” Cephalie popped into existence on Isaac’s shoulder. “Gilbert asked me and a few of the Gordian ACs to help track down what happened there.”

“I figured you wouldn’t mind,” Gilbert said.

“Whatever helps us resolve this case faster.” Isaac turned to his IC. “So, what did you find?”

“Signs of really skillful hacking. Somehow this Creed-a-like managed to cut through every access barrier I’d stuffed into the room.” Cephalie pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Made my efforts look like a complete joke.”

“He shouldn’t have been able to access the infostructure at all,” Isaac said. “The microbots should have kept him data-isolated all on their own.”

“Except the microbots weren’t under our control.” Gilbert tapped a vial of milky fluid beside the synthoid. “They’d been reprogrammed.”

“How?” Isaac asked.

“Not sure, but I’m guessing it was done almost as soon as the swarm was introduced. It’ll take time to make sense of the revised software, but the end result seems clear enough. Those microbots were faking us out, pretending to be under our control when in fact Creed could have gotten up at any time.”

Isaac frowned at this, his mind flashing back to an image of the synthoid lunging at him, fingers reaching for him.

If Susan hadn’t been in the room . . . 

“What did he use the access for?” Isaac asked.

“He sent a data packet to Scaffold Delta,” Cephalie said. “Or tried to. Not sure what was in the packet, though, or what it would have done had it arrived. It’s encrypted and I haven’t managed to bust through it yet.”

“Fortunately, the ship was already data-isolated,” Gilbert said. “And those barriers held.”

“Then we don’t know what he was trying to achieve,” Isaac said.

“Not yet. Maybe Kikazaru will turn up something as he digs through the ship’s infostructure.” Gilbert grabbed one of his screens and shifted it closer to Isaac. “And speaking of which, take a look at this.”

Isaac skimmed over the screen.

“What are we looking at?” Susan asked.

“Pieces of a connectome transit log, it seems,” Isaac said.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Gilbert said. “Kikazaru turned up this nugget from temporary memory in the scaffold’s backup transceiver controller. The primary had been scrubbed, but looks like they didn’t quite clear out the secondary. Most of the data is missing—having been written over by normal activity, like self-diagnostic processing—but what we do have includes the source coordinates.”

“Coordinates for where?”

“High-end beachfront property on Luna. Lacus Oblivionis, to be precise.”

“Hmm.” Isaac pursed his lips, then glanced to Cephalie. “How large a city are we talking here?”

“About a hundred thousand physical,” Cephalie said, summoning a blackboard. Chalked script scrolled down it too fast to read. “And another fifty thousand ACs, though the totals fluctuate with Earth’s seasons, spiking most during the middle of summer for the northern hemisphere. Lots of resorts and related businesses.”

“What are you thinking?” Susan asked.

“That the Institute operatives—” Isaac paused, then snorted. “Or operative, singular, may have come from there.”

“Worth us checking out, then?”

“Yes, but we need to narrow it down somehow.”

“The coordinates are laser-precise,” Gilbert said, “so you’ve got a starting position.”

“True, but that’ll most likely be a relay point. Not the true point of origin.”

“What about that Xenophon guy?” Susan asked. “Fake-Creed didn’t like it when you brought him up. Maybe we can see if he’s been active on Luna?”

“My thoughts exactly.” Isaac gave her a half smile. “Yes, I do believe we need to take a long, hard look at Doctor Xenophon’s recent activities. Keep it up, Gilbert. Let us know if you find anything else.”

“Will do.”

Gilbert turned back to his screens, and the two detectives stepped out.

“Where to next?” Susan asked.

“Commissioner Schröder wants an update,” Cephalie chimed in, still on Isaac’s shoulder.

“Then that settles that,” Isaac said. “We can brief him on the latest and then talk to Elifritz about heading back to SysGov. I doubt there’s much we can do here but wait for Gilbert to finish his work. Whereas a detour over to Luna might prove more fruitful.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Susan said.

The two settled into a brisk walk back to the central grav shaft, and Isaac found himself thinking back to fake-Creed’s last moments, how mentioning Xenophon had shaken him, stripping away his confidence and bravado to the point where he resorted to a desperate attack.

He saw that hand reaching for him once more through his mind’s eye, and Susan bursting into view, just a blur of frantic motion that caught Creed’s synthoid and slammed him into the wall.

But why did he rush me? Isaac thought. What did he have to gain from that? I’d already connected him to Xenophon, and his actions only served to reinforce the point. Am I missing something here?

He stopped in front of the grav shaft, and Susan came to a halt beside him.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just thinking back to Creed’s attack. Something feels off about it, but I’m not sure what.”

“Wasn’t he just lashing out?”

“That’s just it. He didn’t lash out. Not immediately. He cut through the data isolation first, remember.”

“Oh yeah. Now that you mention it, that did place me on guard. If he really wanted to take you out, he would have been better off lunging in straight away.”

“Which could mean his attack was just a distraction.”

“But a distraction from what? His packet to the scaffold didn’t go anywhere.”

“I know, and that’s another thing that’s bugging me,” Isaac said. “He must have known we’d isolate the ship as one of our first orders of business. Why try to contact it at all if . . . ”

He trailed off, a thought tickling the edge of his mind.

On the surface, both his attack and the attempt to contact the ship were failures. Why then did he seem to regain his composure in the end, right up to the moment where he deleted his own mind? “Enjoy this moment, girl. It won’t last.” That’s what he said.

But he failed.

Right?

“The look in his eyes at the end,” Isaac said. “It’s like he knew he’d won this round.”

“But he didn’t,” Susan said. “We stopped him cold.”

“That’s certainly what it looks like.” Isaac let out a heavy, frustrated exhale. “But now I’m not so sure. Fake-Creed accessed the infostructure first, so between attacking me and contacting his ship, the ship was more important to him.”

“But he never got through to it.”

“I know.”

What am I missing?

What are we still missing?

“The drone,” Isaac muttered.

“What drone?” Susan asked. “You mean the one from the Quark.”

“It’s still loose on the station. Cephalie?”

“Yes?” She took a long, floating leap from his shoulder to the top of the LENS.

“Is it possible the packet wasn’t meant for Scaffold Delta at all?” Isaac asked. “Could a copy of it have been routed elsewhere?”

“Possibly,” Cephalie said. “There’s a clear routing trail from his conference room to the scaffold’s dock, but I suppose it’s possible there was other activity along the way. I spent most of my time looking into the breach, so I wouldn’t know. Gordian agents are checking the rest of the routing path, but they’re not done yet.”

“Then it could have been sent to our missing drone.”

“What for, though?” Susan asked.

“I’m not sure. Unless . . . ”

A terrible thought came to his mind. One that tied Providence Station to Reality Flux.

And its explosive demise.

“We need to talk to Andover-Chen!” Isaac snapped. “Right now!”



Back | Next
Framed